How to Write Sales Copy for your Emails to Get Results?

I had a little talk with one of my friends a few days ago and he told me that selling is an art, especially online. But I completely disagree.

Art is something that comes from the artists’ souls. If you would like to know how to write a sales copy in your emails that work, you just have to provide a good product, learn about your market and gather experience in copywriting.

I share the basics of email sales copywriting that you can use for your own business: what you should write about, how you should present it and how can you start it right away.

What you offer is much more than selling features

Let’s start with the most important thing: the difference between feature, benefit, and experience. A good sales copy focuses on benefit, pretty good sales copy focuses on experience. Here is an easy-to-understand example for you for a TV:

Feature: This TV is 75” wide, resolution is 4k

Benefit: Big screen TV

Experience: Watching this TV feels like you’re in a Cinema

This TV brings the cinema into your living room. It has a big screen, 75” wide with 4k resolution.

See?

We started with the experience you can have with it, then we shred the benefit and supported it with the features.

You can tell that it’s easy for a simple TV, but check out Crowdfire for example:

“Go big with Crowdfire. Your super-smart marketing sidekick.”

This is the tagline that explicitly tells your desired end result (go big) and tells you the experience you can have with it (a good friend, a sidekick).

Then (if you scroll down) the benefits part starts: 1-minute marketing. so easy, it’s like magic,

Then you can read the feature by clicking “See what Crowdfire can do” (it’s a social media management platform by the way).

Or check Asana:

Experience: Move work forward, Asana is the easiest way for teams to track their work—and get results.

Benefit: Track projects from start to finish

Features: With tasks, projects, conversations, and dashboards, Asana enables teams to move work from start to finish.

Awesome web page sales copies, aren’t they?

The same structure works well in your email’s sales copy too: tell the desired end result, the experience you serve.

Tell the benefits that help your prospects reach this experience and support it with the features you have and explain how it helps them get there.

How to start writing?

1. Grab a piece of paper & a pen (well, go to your computer to save the forests) and collect the features you have:
   – Fast adaptive streaming
   – support for 4K and 360 video
   – Fully responsive
   – Detailed video analytics
   – APIs and thorough documentation
   – password protection, gating, and domain restriction

1. Now organize the features that support important benefits for your prospects.
   – Host it like it’s hot
   – Boost your video marketing
   – Power your product
   – Control your content

1. Summarize the benefits and understand what is the big picture you provide
   – Every business can communicate more creatively. Wistia is a video platform built to help you stand out.

1. Now build your sales copy around that 1 most important benefit or the value proposition itself. Don’t forget to keep your buyer personas in mind and focus on their biggest 1-3 problems you can solve with it! 

1. Add different social proofs (company logos and testimonials)

1. Write the call-to-actions: tell people what to do next!

1. Test it. Not always you write the words that truly resonate with your audience – this is why you should tweak the main messages and try to get back to it over and over again.

Here’s an imaginary email sales copy for Wistia based on this:

“Hey {{NAME}},

Would you share your best video with me?

In return, I will tell you a little trick, {{Name}}.

Did you know that most companies in {{your industry}} are boring as hell?

That’s a shame because the next gen video marketing is here that helps you get tons of traffic, more leads and keep your audience engaged like angels.

Collect leads via email collectors in your videos & bring more traffic to your web pages via automated video SEO. Awesomeness itself – the reason MOZ or Squarespace use it for their own marketing.

Why not use it for yourself too?

Now your turn: share your best video with me, {{Name}}! 😉

Cheers,

XY”

Less is more… isn’t it?

As you can see, copywriting is not wizardry but can be very challenging.

One of the most important decisions, when you’re sitting in front of your email, is the length of your sales copy.

I don’t really want to join the debate of Long and Short sales copy believers… I love the philosophical games but now we’re talking about a business tool, not about something that can be argued.

So these are the variables that decide the length of your email sales copy:

• Your audience circumstances and behavior.
  Do they have time to read a long copy? Do they usually read longer copies? Are they opened to in-depth details or just want to know the benefits? You have to test it and see how your audience reacts to long and short sales copy.

• The perceived size of the requested commitment.
  You want somebody’s  email address or you want to sell? Giving away an email address is a smaller commitment from your prospect’s perspective, therefore the sales copy length can easily reflect that.

• The price of your offer.
  The higher the price the higher the investment that is necessary for your prospects. It will create more and more uncertainty, it will make them hesitate and think. So the higher the price, the more stress you have to reduce and the longer your sales copy should be. (Keep in mind that for example, techies don’t like to read long text. No matter how high your price is. Therefore you should always get back to the previous point: to your audience.)

• The complexity of your product/service.
  The more complex your product or service is, the more difficult to understand its benefit – therefore the more you have to explain it. For instance, explaining the benefits of an SAP module can be truly complicated… well, at least it’s difficult to understand.

What if my conversion rate is 0?

Not everything depends on good sales copy.

Good copy can give a big boost to your business by converting more customers than you would have with bad copy.

It also means, that your core offer, your value proposition alone will bring in customers. Not as many as you would have with an astonishing sales copy.

Sorry, it is possible, that your product is just not needed on the market.

Don’t panic though’, little tweaks in your targeting or on the product itself can solve this problem. This is the pivoting that small businesses do when they face difficulties in their markets.

Do you want to expand your knowledge with some more email tips and tricks?